Alternating power-wielding

To serve as a steward is to hold something in trust. It means you don't get to use the thing you're stewarding. 

Our relationship to the earth is not as that of a steward but rather as that of an alternate. Not unlike the passing of the old ATT's leadership back and forth between engineering and marketing so Israel's use of the land passes back and forth between man and God. 

The political/economic and ideological manner in which God and man relate to each other is not through the administration of law but rather through an alternating entitlement of each side of the covenantal partnership, thereby forcing each side to take into consideration how the other side will behave when they are in power. 

That is the essence of Rawls' theory of justice: how will the other behave when he/she has power and you don't. It's a more primitive form of the golden rule: wield power knowing you will one day be the subject of another's power: wield power so as to have the power wielded on you to be most benign. Golden rule; Justice-as-fairness; tit for tat – they are all based on the same notion of surrogacy, the expectation of alternation of power-wielding. 

You need to have covenantal partners who are roughly equivalent in order for the process of alternation to be effective. God needs for us to march upright and be autonomous so that in the profane years He can depend on us to serve properly as His alternate. 

Deservedness has to do with the relation between creator and creature. It is the root of all property rights: things belong to he (or He) who makes the thing. Property over a thing is the expression of having made the thing. The basis of all relationship, of all connectedness, of all belonging, is the property rights that come of making a thing and bringing it into the world. 

Deservedness thus defines belonging while fairness defines power. Deservedness flows from the will's creative power that comes from an expression of the seeking instinct while fairness flows from administrative power over that which has already been made and comes from the consuming instinct. 

Extraction is the confusion of administrative power for creative power.